The door was low, barely five feet high, cut directly into the stonework base of an old chimney stack. It was clad in scrap iron boiler plate, bolted together with mismatched rivets that were weeping orange rust down the painted surface. Above the top door beam, a heavy iron balance weight hung suspended on a grease-blackened hemp line, hooked to an overhead timber beam by a hair-trigger trip-sear.
Len knelt on the crunchy bitter salt shale, his ash-wood sounding pole set flat on the frozen earth. He pulled an animal fat candle stub from his cap pocket and shielded the wick with his curled fingers, angling the faint yellow flame across the threshold stones.
“Wire,” he whispered.
A thin strand of drawn piano wire ran two inches above the ground stone. It was tied to a forged iron peg on the left door post and disappearing into the wall casing on the right. If a boot struck that wire in the dark, the sear would trip, releasing sixty pounds of iron fire-grate directly down across the doorway.
“Step high,” Ivara directed in a bare whisper. She stepped over the wire with her right boot and landing lightly on the dry brick floor inside.
